Monday 30 June 2003

Pic of the day: Some of the 200 billion stars in the anime Boys be....

Beside the world

"Some 15 billion years ago the universe was born.
In our Milky Way there are about 200 billion stars.
Even now, among those stars great battles may be fought.
But this has nothing to do with me at all."

Those were the opening lines of the first episode of the anime Boys be..., which I have mentioned recently. The one that had me wonder for a while. And I guess those lines are at the heart of it.

"The eyes of the fool are at the ends of the world" says a Biblical proverb. And by that measure I guess I am foolish indeed. For I am unable for long to hold on to that conclusion, that nothing of this has anything to do with me. While I'm not worried about interstellar wars, it is mostly because I know how vast the distances are, and how unlikely intelligent life is in the cosmos. But the cosmology is always with me when I watch the stars; and looking at the beauty of the trees I see their fractal patterns. Knowledge and observation blend together. The life around me and the life in my head are one. But the part in my head tends to win out, I guess, most of the time.

Some - probably most - people are like that young boy. They live so directly in the world. Whatever knowledge they have that is not tied to that experience is "extra" ... It does not really concern them at all. It is abstract, fragmented, unreal, like a dream. They don't have another place to stay than the world.

***

Bear with me that I use a metaphor from my favorite computer game for a moment. I have two characters there now, a paladin and a necromancer. The paladin hacks away at monsters, and they hack away at him. Not so the necromancer. He is a shade, invisible to the enemy and transparent like a shapeless shadow even to his allies. He controls a zombie or other undead body, which does his bidding. The zombie hacks at the monsters, and the monsters at it, while the necro directs it all from outside.

These two approaches can we take to life too, and I am not even sure whether we choose or whether we are born to one of them. And I am like the necromancer. It is good to have a body, but the body isn't me. If I could trade it in for an even better, sure! I would not mind seeing another face in the mirror. The face in the mirror isn't me; it is my body.

***

When nothing else requires my attention, I tend to withdraw into the world in my head. For instance, I cannot read in sunlight, my eyes are too sensitive. So taking the bus on a sunny day, I may write part of a journal entry in my head, or part of a fantasy fiction. If there are daydreams, they are likely to be more like the fantasy stories. Not "and then she will say this and then I will say that and then we will make love". Not to mention the even more hopeless "and if she had said this, I would have said that". Why try to rewrite reality when you can just make your own?

Living beside the world gives emotional stability. Well, it can do that ... I guess that depends on how stable you are in your head. On the extreme end are the fakirs and yogi who disregard pain and death itself as mere natural phenomena, of no more personal interest to them than the stars in the sky. I am not like that. There are things that would unsettle me, like a terminal illness or suddenly going blind, or the end of the world. But not minor things. Like most of my friends turning their back on me because I don't want to change my religion when they do. Like a parent dying after years of cancer. Like the girl I valued like myself, forgetting me. It's part of the world, and so am I. But only part. A part of me lives in a place that follows other rules. A place which is not shaken by those same events.

I guess I am not a very vulnerable person, overall. And surely that is a good thing. But sometimes – not often, but now and again – I feel a need to reach out and touch the world. While I still can. But then it passes, and I am back here.